Should Vice President Joe Biden fire his National Security Adviser or risk drawing the White House further into the Benghazi cover-up?
When the 9/11/12 attacks in Benghazi went down, a man named Jake Sullivan was a Deputy Chief of Staff to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. We now know that Sullivan was intimately involved in altering the talking points given to UN Ambassador Susan Rice, which she used on 9/16/12 during appearances on five separate Sunday talk shows.
In fact, it appears that Sullivan worked intimately with the man who appears to have been at the center of those changes – Mike Morell. At the time, Morell was the number two man at the CIA behind Director David Petraeus. Morell became the interim Director when Petraeus resigned in the days after the election amidst revelations the four-star General had been engaged in an extra-marital affair with Paula Broadwell.
Via Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard:
Mike Morell, deputy director of the CIA, agreed to work with Jake Sullivan and Rhodes to edit the talking points. At the time, Sullivan was deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the State Department’s director of policy planning; he is now the top national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. Denis McDonough, then a top national security adviser to Obama and now his chief of staff, deferred on Rhodes’s behalf to Sullivan.
The email to Rice reported that Sullivan would work with a small group of individuals from the intelligence community to finalize the talking points on Saturday before sending them on to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which had originated the request for talking points.
The sender of the email spoke with Sullivan after the meeting, reminding him that Rice would be doing the Sunday morning shows and needed to receive the final talking points. Sullivan committed to making sure Rice was updated before the Sunday shows. The sender told Sullivan the name of the staffer (redacted in the email) who would be running Rice’s prep session and encouraged the team to keep Rice in the loop.
Quite damning, is it not?
Will Vice President Biden fire Sullivan? If he does not, won’t that bring the White House closer to the heart of the cover-up?
Consider the reasons behind Biden’s hiring of Sullivan back in February.
Via TIME:
After Biden’s national security adviser and long time aide, Anthony Blinken, moved over to become Donilon’s deputy at the NSC last month, Biden poached Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and policy planning director, Jake Sullivan, to replace Blinken. Sullivan was the reliable point of contact between the White House and Clinton’s 7th floor even when other White House and State staffers were at each others’ throats. Losing him to Biden’s office closes one line of influence to the White House for Kerry.
It would seem that Sullivan was chosen by Biden because the former was adept at keeping the State Department and the White House on the same page.
Does this mean that when Sullivan collaborated with Morell to alter the talking points that he was doing so at the behest of the White House?
Evidence points to Biden’s top National Security Adviser being instrumental in these words uttered by Rice on 9/16/12:
The longer Sullivan remains on Biden’s staff as the vice president’s national security adviser – in light of the former’s involvement in misleading the American people about Benghazi – the more questions should be raised about White House involvement in altering those talking points.